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Friday, January 13, 2012

Today I'm going to talk about something many bloggers & blogshop owners will be familiar with - blog statistics.

Naturally I'm aware of how many views my blog garners. I don't stalk it like a crazy woman because I don't like having to freak out & stress over why one day is lower than another lol. I just take a screenshot once in a while so as to send to blogshop owners when they enquire with me about advertorials.

Anyway of course between bloggers, we do have a rough idea of who gets what & how many #kaypoh.

At the same time, we also get to hear of who charges what/how much.
And you know... some charge a far cry from the reality of their statistics.

Whenever a blogshop enquires with me about my rates, I automatically attach a screenshot of my blog statistics with my reply, as does Qiuting. Some bloggers don't, while some, cut off half the image.

Here it is:

(As you can see, on NYE everyone was out partying & not reading my blog haha)
(Still not sure of the purpose of the "skyscraper" since I don't think anyone has 2 stars)

Can you guess which half some bloggers like to cut out?
The Uniques, of course.
Can you guess which figure some bloggers quote for their blog stats?
The Views, of course.

So according to the image above, I have 4000-5000 uniques & 7000-8000 views. Depending on the one I mention to people, the outcome can be very different no? In fact, since I have one day with views of 8843 views, I can even approximate it & say I have 9000 views (which is what some bloggers do).

9000 views.

That is almost double the number of uniques. Hell, that sounds WAY more impressive.
I wish I had 9000 readers.

Because I don't.

Most people use views/hits/uniques very interchangeable when they mean drastically different things.

Uniques: Total number of visitorsViews: Total number of pageloads/pageviewsHits: Total number of loads of each & every single image/button/widget/etc

The Nuffnang screenshot above doesn't reflect Hits because obviously the numbers can be massive, and I'm sure no one quotes those either because they reflect virtually nothing.

I recommend blogshop owners to be a little more discerning so that they don't end up paying over-inflated charges & then are left wondering why the advertorial didn't work!
(But if your stuff is just ugly then bohpian LOL)

Bet some people will say I sound bitter/sour/self-righteous *shrug* Well, I am!
I always compare their rates to that of Qiuting's because she has one of the highest blog stats around (7000-8000 uniques) & there are bloggers with uniqueshalf of mine, quoting prices more than Qiuting's!

There are many blogshop owners falling for it because they hide their uniques or over-inflate (e.g. by quoting their all-time, one-off peaks) & this can make a serious dent in a less established blogshop's funds as well as dishearten them when they see no results.

I've even heard of some (none that I know personally) bloggers who PHOTOSHOP the screenshot! In those cases... you're just really unlucky. Well then you just have to go by a lucky guess. If she "has" 7k readers, how can she only have 2k Twitter followers? Twitter followers are not 100% accurate, but they give a rough gauge.

P.S. You can also buy Twitter followers by the way. It's 10USD-15USD per 1000 followers. It's fairly easy to spot really, since the number jumps drastically (I can't believe these websites sell by the 1000 instead of by the 100 or 10) & you will notice that the number of replies the person gets from followers is very, very low.
E.g. 20k followers, 1 or 2 replies in 3 days (true story)

omg Sophie! I know of a blogger that "cheats" on her stats! she printscreen the views only! i have alway found it weird how she claims to have 10k views but her twitter followers are only 2+k?

Another point is that the views is also dependent on how many banners you put on site, if you put 2, ur uniques will be approx slightly lesser than half of your page views, if 3 banners then uniques will be a third.

Haha I don't know about the person you guys are talking about so you can keep discussing. I know of one blogger for sure who does the screenshot-views-only thing in replies to blogshops, not sure about others.

I wouldn't call it cheating in the way that editing your stats screenshot is... more like just selectively highlighting one good part lol.

Sin Yee: They are actual people! I'm not sure how it works exactly because it's by some techie RSS feed shit, but because they're actual people, they can choose to unfollow you eventually. So these bloggers actually have to CONTINUOUSLY BUY FOLLOWERS. Uncool or not lololol.

Pearlene: No lah, frankly it's SUPER common. Like majority of the bloggers will just say "I get xxxx views a day" w/o any screenshots, while some will screenshot just the views lor!

Views obviously sound better, just that the number can be a LOT bigger than the actual uniques, that's why it's not that accurate. I mean imagine if a blogger blogged twice that day & tweets about it, she'll get x2 views & can she quote that? Not very fair.

A blogger quoting views is not wrong or anything lah, in fact most do that. This post was for the blogshop owners; just to explain that there's a difference between views & uniques, which most owners don't realise :)

Anyway Ivan, it's proportional! It goes by CTR (Click Through Rate), so to take an exaggerated example:

You have 10 readers; 2 of them click on your ad. That gives you a 20% CTR, which is really high percentage! Whereas for me if I get a 1% CTR, that means about 45 people clicked on the ad.